It’s grim up north. Especially in the 1980s. Boys from the Blackstuff is a play for anyone who is feeling nostalgic for the working-class misery of yester-year.
First aired in 1980, as part of the BBC anthology series Play for Today, Alan Bleasdale’s The Blackstuff was a film about a group of Liverpudlian tarmac layers who become involved in a scam while working in Middlesbrough and consequently lose their jobs. Bleasdale followed up two years later, with a five-part series, Boys from the Blackstuff, which looked at how the characters from the original film were coping with life on the dole. The series has cast a long shadow.
In a poll conducted by the British Film Institute , Boys from the Blackstuff was voted the best-ever British television drama, and as the BFI noted, “It still stands as TV’s most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era and as a lament to the end of a male, working class British culture.” Now that’s happened, there is a sense of inevitability it would become a play, and it was Liverpool’s Royal Court, under Kevin Fearon, that were the original producers and commissioners of the stage adaptation. Playwright James Graham – who won the Olivier for Best New Play with last year’s Dear England – has taken the stories from each episode of the TV series, edited and remixed them, and produced two and a half hours of theatre, which becomes more engaging as the details of the characters’ lives are fleshed out.
In a strong ensemble, there.